March Wrap-Up + April Sneak Peek

Hello, Patrons of all levels, shapes, sizes, and colors! I have a major, month-end bulletin for you as CK's insiders and critical supporters.

This month may not have been quite as obvious of a blockbuster as February for CK, but incredibly big stuff still happened thanks in large part to your support - and there's more on the way in April.

Plus, it's the end of the quarter, so I have some big goals to check in on!

Below, I've recapped all the action for you in a series of easy-to-swallow bullet points. Then, for those of you who love to devour the details, I'll recap everything in a longer form below.

Hero we go!

March Wrap-Up:

• March was CK's highest traffic month of all time (OMFG!)
• I hit 2 of 4 of my Quarterly Goals, and made great progress on the other two.
• This campaign grew 18% and is only $2 away from the $84/month pledge goal, which would pay for all of CK's current essential costs.
• I made the first major update to the Guide to Marvel Omnibuses & OHCs as my thank you for helping me reach our $66 pledge goal!
• 3 new comic guides launched to Crushing Comics Club, plus 1 to Pledgeonauts!
• Pledgeonauts got CK logins (so they could see their new guide)!
• 5 comic guides became available to the public!
• Blog posting got back on track, with a post on half the days of the month.
• I maintained my gym streak and today ran a sub-10-minute mile for the first time in many years.

Sadly, I didn't make it to the video content I had planned for the month. I have a little more to say about that below, but first - a sneak peek at April!

April Sneak Peak:

• Hopefully break the $84 campaign goal so I can completely pay for CK with your support and deliver the awesome new "X-Men Index"
• Launch 4 or more new comic guides, plus a new Patrons' Choice guide (more on my choices in yesterday's poll )
• Release 4 comic guides to the public
• Revise CK's overall taxonomy
• Add image-based sliders to CK homepage navigation
• Complete updates to existing Marvel guides
• Continue to update the Guide to Marvel Omnis & OHCs
• Review more new X-Men comics !
• Take another swing at video content

If you want to stop reading now, that's totally cool - you've heard it all! Just know that I appreciate your support today and every day.

If you want a more nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes look at what's happening at CK, keep reading!

March was CK's highest traffic month of all time

I am still stunned by this.

I learned at my analytics startup not to make a daily obsession of metrics that you have no control over and cannot take action upon, so I don't tend to check my analytics daily. It wasn't until about a week ago that I noticed that we were on pace to have one of CK's top five months of traffic of all time.

It was then I started checking in daily. The pace not only kept up, it slightly increased. Around noon on Wednesday we broke through - March 2017 officially became CK's most-trafficked month of all time!

The truly awesome thing is: there wasn't a single popular post, no massive Reddit effect, and no single traffic source that was responsible for this change. Smashing my old record was down to totally healthy, totally organic, across-the board growth (with a heaping helping of assistance from the redesign).

Quarterly Goals, Part 1: Goals I shared in December

At the end of December I shared a set of goals I wanted to hit this quarter - so how did I do?

• Goal: 90 posts in 90 days
• Achieved: ~30 posts in 90 days

This was an attainable goal, but my plan of attack was all wrong.

I wanted to write daily posts as intense as the ones I was writing in November plus new kinds of posts like the Weekly Releases. There wasn't enough time to do that while also launching a guide per week with guides averaging >10hrs to complete. 

And, you know, also parenting and occasionally sleeping.

Similarly, adding video is easy to do but stresses me out. Adding it to the rotation wasn't going to happen while I was struggling just to make posts!

However, in March I found a way to make more short and templated posts, and it wound up being a month with a new post on over 50% of its days - and that is never bad.

I'll re-attack this goal in Q2. I'm confident I can find a way to produce at least one guide each week and also post nearly daily and finally do more video.

• Goal: >150% Y/Y returning users to homepage.
• Achieved >210% Y/Y returning users to homepage.

Wow. 

I'll simply note that I was already on-pace to beat this goal before the redesign. (I also had a M/M goal, but that was poorly defined.)

• Goal: >10 DC Guides launched (plus X-23)!
• Actual: 14 DC Guides launched, plus X-23, Alpha Flight, & Conan

This took a ton of work, but it was so damn satisfying to see CK finally cover my personal favorite hero (Wonder Woman) as well as my most-requested hero of all time (Batman). 

The me of a year ago would have never believed me if I told me that I would accomplish all of that.

For the record, that's 21 guides launched in the 5 months of this campaign versus 17 guides launched in the prior 12 months

• Goal: Update all 80+ Marvel pages with new collections.
• Actual: Completed 20 pages; remaining 60 still in-progress

This miss was a conscious decision. I updated the most important pages and made enough updates to other pages so that I didn't feel like any major guide was grossly out of date. Then I back-burned this to focus on other work.

I'd like to get all the guides updated through the 2017 December solicits and then put them on a rotating schedule, so that each month I just have to spend an hour or two updating less than a dozen guides rather than do this big all-at-once drama. That will keep things manageable as the DC Guides begin to need updating.

• Goal: Mobile-friendly redesign with magazine-style front page.
• Achieved! 

Still puts a smile on my face :)

Guide to Marvel Omnibuses & OHCs

Hitting the $66 pledge goal came with the first celebratory content reward for all readers - a major update to the Marvel Omnibus & OHC page!

I'm happy to announce step one of that update is already complete: The guide now includes every Omnibus and OHC Marvel has ever produced, including solicitations through the end of 2017.

I still have a lot left to add to make the guide the best it can be, which I'll continue to work on in April:

• Adding cover images for 2016-17 books
• Repairing the variant cover function, which is a big help to folks researching which editions to purchase.
• Complete the ISBN, release date, and MSRP data for over 300 OHCs

Pledgeonauts got CK logins!

Earlier this week, everyone who pledges between $1.99-3.98 received CK logins to access the new Patrons' Choice poll winning guide, Alpha Flight.

I said at the beginning of this campaign that I don't want to spend time and effort making custom rewards for Patrons because that takes away from the time I spend on improving CK for all readers. However, as the campaign has progressed I've started to better appreciate the power of saying thank you in different ways to you, because I so much appreciate the support you've given me.

To spend a few hours a month getting ahead on a guide I'd be building later anyway is an easy way for me to say thanks. I have a few more ideas for ways to say thank you, but if you have anything in mind I'd love to hear it!

CK Taxonomy + CK Homepage Navigation

A few weeks ago I was on an adventure with the little one and Mother of Krisis, and we were talking about my various blog work as we drove across the South Street Bridge.

MoK said, "Oh, I loved that post on Hezekiah Jones, but you mostly seem to be writing about comics."

I winced a little. On one hand, yes, many of my recent posts had been about comics. Yet, I knew there were personal posts in there she hadn't read, and comics posts tinged with personal she'd likely skip (like this month's post about reading Wonder Woman with EV ).

That brought my mind back to one of the big reasons I've always wanted to redesign CK with a modern WordPress theme - so that I could introduce visual navigation to CK in the magazine style layout favored by the majority of major outlets. (You can see me aping this on both the Marvel  and DC  main pages, but that's built by hand rather than handled systematically by WP.)

That Hezekiah Jones post would be new to a once-a-month reader who visits for music, but right now it's buried under a ton of comics content. However, a visual navigation for "Read the newest Music posts!" would send that reader right to what they want.

Before I can do that, I need to completely revamp the Category taxonomy of close to 5000 posts! My sprawling Category system was originally designed before Tags existed to act more as an Index than a Table of Contents. 

Then, I need to rework the sliders function of my theme to serve up links to each major Category, rather than just linking to one post each.

That change will push CK even farther in the direction of being a regular destination for a wider array of readers, which was part of the vision I previewed during my Blog of Tomorrow launch in November. 

Which brings me to one final section...

Quarterly Goals, Part 2: The one really big goal I didn't share

I had one really big personal milestone I wanted to reach this quarter - an aggregate goal for CK profit and traffic that went beyond the goals I shared with you.

The goal was more than a little bit of a stretch. In fact, I would call it "a bit unrealistic."

I crushed that high, stretchy, unrealistic goal.

I want you to know that when it comes to feeling accountable to someone for CK's success, you are the 80% in the 80/20 rule. I've been doing this thing for 16 years, but now that you're here I want it to be the best CK it's ever been.

All of the goals and plans I've shared with you so far - DC Guides, internationalization, CK's redesign - contributed to CK's unprecedented success for the quarter. None of those things were going to happen before this campaign began. They are all the building blocks to get CK to that future "Blog of Tomorrow" reality in terms of design, content, traffic, and social proof.

My goals for next quarter are going to be an even bigger stretch - maybe an insurmountable one, given recent changes to Amazon's affiliate structure making it harder for CK to create its own profit. I'm going to have to work twice as hard just to get to the same point I could reach back in October.

Yet, that's exactly is why we have goals in life - not only to stretch and challenge ourselves, but to know when it might be time to change tactics or acquire a new skill. 

I'm happy to be able to share that story with you.

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That's all I've got for now! If you made it to the bottom of this missive, I'd love to know what details are the most surprising or exciting to you.

Excelsior!